Rose swam to a dinghy filled with refugees. The passengers smacked at her hands, trying to shoo her away. She climbed onto the rustic sea vessel. Chest-high water sloshed inside the small craft. The cold water felt prickly lapping at her feet, legs, and chest. Her hair froze like strands of spun glass. She prayed she would lose consciousness.
Just before 9 P.M. Eva Dorn was passing cotton balls to a doctor in one of the makeshift delivery rooms. He told the 18-year-old not to worry, that the ship was pretty much out of submarine territory. In the next room a woman was in labor. Then, just as a nurse opened the door to tell the doctor that the baby was crowning, the first torpedo struck.
A skeleton in a glass case fell in front of the infirmary’s door and shattered. Another boom. The second torpedo hit. The door was blocked. Then, on the third strike the door sprang open. Eva stepped over the glass and over the skeleton. “I thought to myself ‘You have stepped over death. Nothing will happen to you,’” Eva said, her left arm starting to tremble as she recounted this part of her story.19
Eva hurried out of the room and turned left down a small stairway to the lifeboats. A pile of life vests lay on the floor. She took one. She reached the railing and a crowd of people. There were soldiers in front of the boats, and Eva helped put women and children into the lifeboats. Suddenly a lifeboat filled with people tipped and fell. As Eva tells this part of the story her fingers tighten around her cigarette. Her left arm shakes and she tries to hold it down.
The soldier looked at Eva. “‘Girl, now you go in,’ he told me,” Eva said. “I was on automatic pilot. I got into the boat. It was silent.” Two men, dressed in civilian clothes accompanied the women, children, and Eva, who wore only her uniform. They rowed. Eva Dorn sat in the crowded lifeboat, a girl and a boy under each arm. One of the children cried, the other vomited over her shoulder. She clamped the lifeboat’s rudder under her arm. The Wilhelm Gustloff was to her back.
All around Eva, people in the water thrashed and flailed. They tried to hang on to the boat. The two men in Eva’s boat and some of the women hit their hands to knock them off.
“A man in the water, he looked at me. He wanted to come in. I could sketch him now. His eyes looked at me. As he was slowly letting go, going under, his eyes were fixed at me. I couldn’t leave the rudder,” Eva said. It was dark, but it didn’t seem dark. The water shone like silver, she said.
Eva now faced the Wilhelm Gustloff. She saw it sink. She heard the screams: “I have that always in my ears.”
Serafima Tschinkur grabbed her daughters, Irene and Ellen, and their cousin Evi by their arms. They ran upstairs to the next floor, by now a veritable ice rink. They gripped the railing. Irene felt Evi’s hand slip from her grasp. By then the Wilhelm Gustloff slanted so much, the four slid into the sea with so many others. An avalanche of suitcases, bags, and even a baby carriage tumbled over their heads. Water pulled them down and pushed them up. Irene thought her lungs would burst. Masses of people roiled in the water. Irene screamed for her mother in the watery darkness. In the water Serafima lost her last rings off her fingers—her wedding ring and one with a large light blue stone in it, which Irene had always admired.
“It was stormy, cold, and there were high waves. I gave ourselves up in God’s hands when we reached the highest deck. I held all the three children as long as I could until there was a loud bang and we were torn from each other and fell into the water. I personally was under water and hoped, may God grant me a quick death (I assume there was an ice floe above me),” Serafima wrote.
Somehow mother and daughter found each other and managed to swim to a boat. Evi vanished into the deep. “I remember it was snowing,” Irene said. “The moon hid behind the clouds and then it would come out again.”
“It was not long as the first detonation exploded,” Helga Reuter recalled. “The air got dusty. We knew what happened. I grabbed my fur coat and put it on, then the life vest. My sister and aunt left their fur coats on the floor and took their [life] swim vests. I had to crawl like a dog, my knees buckled; they gave way for panic. People tumbled over me and I hurt my back.”
At the door of the promenade deck, Helga breathed in a lungful of fresh air and stood. She, her aunt Ruth, and her sister Inge moved as quickly as possible in the darkness. On deck, the combination of ice and lack of trained crew members exacerbated the frantic situation. The ship canted more and more with each passing minute. Lifeboats remained frozen to their davits. People clawed and smashed at the lifeboats with bare hands trying to free them. Reportedly, only one lifeboat was lowered correctly during the sinking. Other lifeboats made it down, but just barely. The cables on many lifeboats snapped, fell, and capsized, tossing their occupants into the icy water or crushing those who were in the water beneath. Some useless antiaircraft guns broke free and plummeted overboard, landing on a fully occupied lifeboat.
Some survivors reported seeing a high-ranking officer with his wife lowering a motorboat only half-filled with people. The craft passed right by the plate glass of the enclosed promenade deck, jammed with desperate women and children. Helga could only imagine what those on both sides of the glass were thinking. It seems selfish acts weren’t reserved strictly for the passengers.
When Helga and her companions reached the lifeboats, they were told the vessels were reserved for mothers with children. They watched, helpless as crewmen hammered the boats loose from the mother ship. The Wilhelm Gustloff started rolling violently to the other side. Shots suddenly fired into the night; SOS flares lit the sky. All the while Helga, Inge, and their Aunt Ruth gripped the railing and watched, stunned, as people slid to their deaths in the frigid waters of the Baltic Sea.
Helga saw rafts being lowered into the water. Unlike the lifeboats, the rafts, with their net flooring, had much less stability. She inhaled sharply and without hesitation she decided they should slide down a rope into the water after the rafts. Inge didn’t want to follow. Helga persuaded her older sister to shimmy down the rope after her. Her aunt refused.
The girls wore layers of clothing and boots so heavy that they soaked up the water and threatened to pull them beneath the waves. Inge wore a yellow and brown sweater underneath a green-and-white striped sweater she had knitted herself.
When Helga’s turn came to descend the thick rough rope, she noticed her sister’s raft had already drifted away, without her sister on it. Once on her raft, she pushed herself up and searched everywhere for her sister. Helga looked up at the ship, squinting her eyes against the snow and cold. She saw her Aunt Ruth still standing at the railing in her black dress with pockets trimmed in white fur. Helga neither yelled nor waved; the screaming people made it impossible to hear.
Then Helga saw her sister Inge.
“With the white stripes it gave a light through the night. She was petite. Her skirt was flowing around her like a circle, very nicely, very neatly. She just drifted away,” Helga said, whispering the memory. “I thought about her riding boots she had on, and then, the water must be icy.”
Inside Helga’s raft she and the other refugees worked furiously to balance the craft against the heaving sea. The high waves made this hard work. They tried to move their legs in the small space. After a while they saw empty rafts float past. Their occupants had succumbed to cold and exhaustion, and had fallen into the sea like trees felled from a lumberjack’s axe.
Helga’s raft was not immune to the enemies of cold and sea swells. “We had been 18 sitting or hanging on the raft. Now I counted four seamen. Their uniforms were as hard as a board. Our ‘icicle hair’ started to dry,” Helga said. One of the young men in the boat had fallen forward inside the net. He stared at her, saliva foaming at the corner of his blue-tinged mouth. She tried to lift him to a sitting position but couldn’t. Across from her sat a young seaman. He begged his comrades for one cigarette. Another delirious man kept talking about his wife and baby girl who had been born on Christmas Day. He’d never seen the infant. Another soundlessly fell backward yet again. He had no mo
re strength to balance. After the third or fourth time, the other two men just tipped him back and he was gone. They were afraid he would pull them into the water with them.
Helga’s two remaining companions soon vacillated between despondency and complaints. They feared their feet would be amputated. Then they grumbled about her feet. She wanted to move them to keep blood circulating through her toes. They wanted her to hold still. She couldn’t help bumping her feet against theirs. Then one of the men started snapping. He said he had been torpedoed before but that it had never taken so long to be rescued. The lifeboats lacked rudders and there was no gasoline to power them, they simply bobbed on the waves. Helga looked up at the starless night; snow fell on her blonde lashes.
“Then I saw the lights from the ship flare up. People screamed. The tail went up and the ship was gone,” said Helga.
Captain Paul Vollrath ate his supper in his cabin with other officers. The cabin was the only place left to eat since refugees and naval personnel occupied the entire ship. They were in every hall, every room, and every closet. Vollrath and his shipmates talked a bit of shop after they ate, and then, just before 9 P.M., two officers of his watch left for their own quarters. Moments later, as Vollrath was about to swing himself into his bunk fully dressed, the first torpedo slammed into the Gustloff’s hull.
“We stepped on a mine!” was his immediate thought, but shortly after that a second and third explosion almost tore the ship apart. He no longer doubted—these were torpedoes. Vollrath jumped into his shoes, which he had taken off against his better judgment, and tied the strings on his life vest.20
His hands trembled, his body shivered with fear. For some reason he grabbed two small parcels, cigarettes, a bottle, flashlight, and tucked his revolver under his life vest. He made his way to the chart room; the doors to it were now blocked. Vollrath passed onto the bridge deck through a side door on the starboard side.
“What I had to face here already so soon after the explosions made me forget altogether to get to the bridge. Immediately after we had been hit by the torpedoes, the ship stopped and listed to port side. Emergency lights had been switched on in the meanwhile and at least one could see better. I lit a cigar, perhaps just to cool my nerves, and a lady came up to me, begging to be saved. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘there is nothing to worry about, don’t you see I am enjoying a cigar?’” Vollrath wrote.
On the starboard side of the boat, people waited to get on the lifeboats that hung from davits. But the heavy list of the ship had shifted the center of gravity. Many lifeboats dipped too much to the port side and couldn’t be moved. In addition, the rope falls and rollers of the lifeboats were iced up and acted as stoppers. Try as they might, the crew couldn’t budge the boats.
“How were we to save all the thousands of people in so short a time, because the ship was listing fast and I knew that she would not last much longer. I knew too that not by far enough life-saving equipment and lifeboats were available. Regretfully I have to admit that. We survivors may always remember that thousands of people drowned or froze to death for us in the biggest of all sea disasters,” wrote Vollrath.
Vollrath said rumors were already circulating among the panicked passengers: murmurs that Captain Friedrich Petersen and Captain Wilhelm Zahn, as well as other officers on the bridge had committed suicide. That story started after many people mistook the firing of the flares for pistol shots. There were rumors that the captains had escaped with a case of champagne in tow.21 Vollrath scrambled to the other side of the boat.
Vollrath made his way to the lifeboat he’d been assigned to, No. 6, which hung on the port side. He tried to convince a group of people to follow him, but most preferred to stay rooted in place. They feared crossing to the other side, where the ship dipped precariously close to the water. They feared they would fall into the water and be sucked under the boat. On his way to the lifeboat, Vollrath passed through the main hall and saw a casual female acquaintance of his, whom he’d once given some advice on what to do in case of a torpedo attack. “I asked her, in an act of bravado, to give me a kiss, which I got without hesitation, though kisses were not so easily exchanged then as they are now,” Vollrath wrote.
When Vollrath reached the port side, empty davits seemed to mock him. The chief officer, an old man of 68 years of age, was lying in the scuppers with a leg injury, visibly shaken and unable to move. Vollrath helped him into the boat. He returned to the starboard side to get more people. It was an uphill struggle since the list was so heavy. Vollrath got into a lifeboat and descended about 15 feet “into the dark uncertainty.” By now the Wilhelm Gustloff nearly lay on her side. He had difficulty steering the lifeboat away from the ship because of the floating debris and the people in the water.
This was the only time that Captain Vollrath took his revolver in hand and threatened to shoot people if they were not instantly silent and if they didn’t follow his command. “Perhaps my shouting did more to restore order than the gun, which could not be seen anyway. In any case very quickly I had the boat under control and away we went,” he wrote. “One of the captains stood in the bridge wing, about 20 feet above us and shouted who was in charge of the boat and I replied to that. To this his reply was ‘Mach’s gut!’—‘Good luck!’ Around us, all around us were humans floating and shouting for help, debris, floats, wooden planks, rafts, everything that could float.”22 The S-13 lurked off port side of the boat—wanting, waiting to fire a fourth torpedo into the cruise liner, or sink any ship coming to rescue.
Inside the lifeboat, Horst snuggled against his mother and stared at the sinking ship. A mere 15 feet lay between Horst’s boat and the Wilhelm Gustloff. It was about 10:30 P.M.; about 90 minutes had passed since the first torpedo strike. Inexplicably, the ship’s lights suddenly blazed, only to be snuffed out in the next second. The ten-year-old watched as the liner gave one final lurch before spearing the water and plunging 150 feet to the seabed. The moon shone and the snow fell.
Nine
THE LITTLE RED SWEATER
The Wilhelm Gustloff sank about 12 nautical miles off Stolpe Bank, an underwater shoal near present-day Poland. Any ship within 10 nautical miles of the Wilhelm Gustloff when the S-13 fired its torpedoes that night would have heard the explosions, Captain Paul Vollrath said.1 The news of the sinking reached the German signals staff in Gotenhafen via the SOS relay that had gone out a few minutes after the attack. In turn, the headquarters relayed the message.
Refugees aboard other transport ships heard the news. For example, aboard the Togo, Dr. Peter Siegel from Homburg-Saar remembered, “During the trip it was noticed that the crew, who was initially in good spirits and talkative, all of a sudden turned stern. I heard that they had just received the news of the sinking of the Gustloff.”2 All available ships from the Hela peninsula, Pillau, and Gotenhafen left their courses to find survivors.
Helga Reuter estimated that perhaps four and a half hours had passed since the Wilhelm Gustloff sank before she spied searchlights on the horizon from inside the lifeboat. Her feet were swollen stiff from the cold and she could no longer feel them in her leather boots. Her face was numb and the saliva in her mouth felt like a thin layer of ice. Her blonde hair lay plastered to her scalp.
Then lights came closer. They belonged to the T-36, a torpedo boat. Upon hearing the distress call, Captain Robert Hering headed straight for the scene of the attack. The T-36 belonged to the Elbing class of small, fast torpedo boats, and throughout the war she had served in the Baltic Sea.
Captain Robert Hering had heard the transmission from the Gustloff around 10 P.M., just about an hour after Marinesko attacked. The boat neared the site at the same time as a barge. The large swells pushed the barge and it kept colliding with the T-36. The Gustloff had not yet gone under, and some passengers on the cruise liner’s upper decks took a chance and jumped into the water. Some made it onto the bucking barge; others were crushed between the barge and the T-36.
Hering couldn’t steer close enough to the Wilhelm
Gustloff without risking his boat and crew. He resigned himself to picking up survivors. Each time the torpedo boat found a lifeboat, the crew threw over the side rope ladders, lines, or hawser netting. The stronger survivors climbed aboard. The weaker ones were pushed and sometimes pulled up in a sling. It quickly became apparent which lifeboats and rafts had able-bodied, experienced seamen inside. Those craft had little trouble maneuvering alongside the T-36, making for an easier rescue. The other boats drifted about. Captain Hering worried that the submarine that had attacked and sank the Wilhelm Gustloff still prowled the waters. He and his crew pushed that thought aside and worked diligently for hours.
The German navy didn’t coordinate the rescue effort; rather those ships that heard the distress call headed toward the scene.
“We yelled and waved our arms,” Helga Reuter said of trying to flag down the T-36. “Finally they came near us and called with a bullhorn. They had to turn around to get us from the right angle to the raft.”3
Reuter’s two exhausted companions mustered enough energy to align their little raft with the rescue boat. The rescuers shouted through the bullhorn to them. Their voices barely carried over the cold air. The rescuers told the three survivors in the raft to get ready to catch a rope. They needed to secure their life raft to the rescue boat, otherwise, it wouldn’t be steady enough for the T-36 crew to pull the three survivors up and over the gunwale, one at a time. The rope flew through the air, but the hands of Helga’s two companions were frozen. Time and again they tried to catch it, and time and again their fingers couldn’t close around the rope. Helga, however, had kept her hands tucked underneath her armpits, beneath her giant fur coat. Every so often she remembered to wiggle her fingers and rotate her wrists. She was able to catch and fasten the rope.
“I was the first to be lifted on this torpedo search boat. I could not stand up,” Helga said, pointing to her feet, which today plague her, nearly 70 years later, with arthritis and cold sensitivity. “They had to carry me inside where all the refugees and rescued sat on the floor or were standing. They got a stool from somewhere for me.”
Death in the Baltic Page 15